Gems For Everybody !

   One of the best professions out there is and always has been the Jewelcrafting, and while many people are diverted back by the strong opposition and the fact their gems are usually undercut in less then 10 minutes but that doesn't have to be the case. What i mean with this is that if you don't want to face the giant head on then kneel down and bite his balls.

   Ok just so we are clear, the biting balls part was merely a comparison and no real biting is going to be required on your part. Now that we got that out of the way i'll actually get down to the real gold making facts, and those facts are quite simple, the forgotten market of the WOTLK gems.

   So before you get down with the idea of doing this whole thing you need to be aware that if you are serious about making gold with this way you will need to have the patterns for the gems or if you don't have the pattern that will require some old daily running so that you can acquire the patterns.

   Ok so right about now you are thinking that this can't be true and that the old gems market is as dead as it can get but that's why you would be dead wrong and i will give you a few pointers on how to do it properly and in the process make a killing on these gems.

   First thing you need to know is that these gems are contrary to common belief in very high demand among leveling up players and twinks, and the higher the population of a server is the greater the demand is and in return the greater the profit is.

   Now there are few things you need to understand about this market before you get into doing it and that is the fact that the supply of the raw gems is extremely limited nowadays due to everyone depleting their WOTLK stock and no one actually going out to farm saronite ore for the prospecting needs, but still there is a low flow of gems getting up on the AH from players leveling up their jewelcrafting and those players not caring about pricing their gems properly due to them wanting to offload them as soon as possible, but even that low supply is more then enough to fill your coffers to the brim with gold.

   Another thing you need to be aware about this is that you should be prepared to invest some gold into acquiring some starting gems be it from buying them straight from the AH as gems or buying some Saronite Ore.

   So like we said the higher the demand is the lower the supply is going to be due to the limited influx of raw gems to the market but even with that there's a good space for profits here, and even if you don't have the actual cut patterns there's a way to get around it and profit from it, though not as much as if you had the actual pattern and if you are wondering how keep reading.

   Ok so if you are still reading up i will take it for granted that you are interested in how to do this whole thing properly and get those great profits i'm talking about.

   Before you get down to evaluating the gems and starting to buy raw gems check out the old gems scene on your server and you are more then likely to see that someone has posted some old cut gems for 10-20g each or even epic ones for as low as 30-50g, if you see those buy them out every single time and the reason behind this is that i have made the prices for the blue ones at 95g while i'm selling the epic ones for 195g but have sold them for 295g as well but they are moving slower at this pace. (this is for me personally but you can choose your own prices be it higher or lower)

   

   Now that you have set your "mind" to the price ranges being 95g and 195g you need to get some gold and invest it in buying out any gems that are up there for anything lower then your target prices and posting them back up for your preffered price. Now this step is that usually deters people from getting in this market due to them having to invest 5, 10 or even more thousands of gold just to buy out the gems and instead of them looking at it as i'm paying 100g for this gem, you should be thinking i am going to be profiting 95g by simply reselling this gem on the AH.

   As you can see on the image ( crappy cropping job on my side due to people sending me chat messages in the My Sales reports ) the gems sell quite well, well at about 3-8k per day, the high points being weekends. 

   From my experience the best sales come from the red gems, no surprise there and from the King's Amber (yellow epic ones) due to the fact that one of the cuts is the +crit and +res one.

   So as a recap of this post, as a start you need to be doing the Dalaran daily JC quests if you don't have the patterns for the cuts, then you need to be on a constant look out for cheap raw gems on the AH so you can cut them for profit, and if you don't have the patterns or hell even if you don't have jewelcrafting and you see someone putting cheap cut gems out there keep buying them out because in the long run you will always profit due to that one person posting cheap gems is going to run out of stock very fast.

   One last thing before we close the book on this thing would be to check out the AH for Frozen Orbs as well as the 3 gems required for crafting the Icy Prism, this used to be a 24h cooldown craft but it was changed with the launch of Cataclysm and if you take into account that it can contain up to 3 rare gems an epic and even a dragon's eye this little guy can rake up some serious profit where one simple Prism can have up to the equivalent of  600g and it's cost could be as low as 30g so that's definitely something to keep your eyes on.

   So there, we are taking up a market that has a fairly good requirement and usually a low to none suppliers for it, and with that in mind we embark on a voyage of epic gold gathering cruise.

   So like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there. 

Researching the Competition ( TUJ Part 2 )

   So now that you have decided which corner of the market you would like to jump in after spending some time into doing your research of the market scoping out those good deals it is time to take a shot at evaluating the second most important thing in the market and that is the competition, and for this as well we will be using the The Undermine Journal.

   Now in the previous post i explained everything you needed to know to get a feel of the market you want to get into and like i said before it's time to get down to checking out if the competition is low, ok of being farmed by a farmer/botter. (FOR THIS INSTANCE I WILL BE TAKING INFORMATION FROM THE SERVER EU-RUNETOTEM ALIANCE SIDE)

   In this next bit i will explain how to get detailed information about a certain seller of a certain item so if by chance your server or name comes up in the explanation don't be a hater due to me explaining how to scope you out :) ( p.s. i decided to keep your anonimity so no danger to you ) ( Scoping - Term used when you are actively following a certain player only to undercut him on any and all auctions leading to him having to repost all his stock and eventually piss him off enough that he vacates your corner of the market )

   For this next part i will continue on like if you had decided to get into the Jewelcrafting market, and we will go step by step in the whole matter so lets begin.

   First things first open up The Undermine Journal and from there go into the Enhancements and Jewelcrafting.

    Provided you did that you will end up on a rather unique page of the TUJ where it shows all the gems and their prices all put down in a single page for you to follow and see which is the most profitable.

   Now you can click on any of the prices and from there it will take you to a page directly showing the details about that item. Now down to actually scoping out the competition, the best way to do this is simply open up some cut gems pages and see who the most active poster is down in the Recent Sellers portion of the page as you can see on the image below.

 
      So now that we have some vague idea as to what we can expect from the market we can either go and say, it's ok five guys i can beat that no problem and jump in straight away or you can spend a few more minutes and actually get the posting times of those guys and see if they are just a one time posters or a regular jewelcrafter that's pretty much supplying the whole server with gems, and the way of doing this is, you guested click on their name. Now that you have done that you are given a bit of information about that character as to what markets he's into (what items he's posting) what times he posts them at (this is the good part) and how many he has posted.

   Now i've taken the posting tables from 3 of the guys i saw that were posting gems and from what you can see from all those white and blue squares is that their posting times are not very cramped which means if you lets say for an instance are a late night bird and stay up till late you can easily take out the 2nd and 3rd competitors for the Late Night Shuffle but the 1st competitor is still going hard at it so you might have to brush elbows with him. On the other side if you are a early bird and wake up early in the morning like 7-8am then you should expect some strong competition in the first hour due to people waking up and going to work and posting their gems before doing so like you can see with the 2nd and 3rd poster.

  ( Just so we are clear for this example i took 3 guys that were showing up on 3 different gems but doing a research on posters only by basing it on 3 items would be wrong because you want to find the big posters not the one time guys so do a more extensive range of research and check all the gems for people that appear on the Sellers List, and if you see a name that shows up on almost every gem then you have a big fish and need to keep an eye on him)

    So to know your competition all you have to do is simply check out the profession you want to do, then check out the items for prices and availability and finally scope out the competition with their posting time so you have their schedule so you know what is the best time to undercut them and take those sweet profits.

   That was about it on how to do the research and just so we are clear this is not ONLY for Jewelcrafting but general for every single profession and item in the game, and all of that provided by our best friend TUMJ (The Undermine Journal)

   So like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.

   So

Doing Your Research The Right Way (TUJ Part 1)

   Have you found yourself in a place where you happen to have a few characters all with their own set of professions that can make you gold but whenever you tried to craft something for a profit you simply can't seem to get it sold due to some weird cruel joke the universe is playing on you and instead of making gold you end up loosing a bunch of gold in the end, or so that is what you think. Well there are ways that can help you get these things to stay in the past and you to get on the fast train to profit town.

   So what you need to know so that you can avoid loosing gold and knowing what's a good place to invest is a bit of a good ol' homework (market research), and don't worry you wont be doing any complex algorithms nor reading tomes of useless junk, no you will be using the one and only TUJ (The Undermine Journal) for this.

   Once again where we will try and elaborate a bit on the whole idea on how to get an idea on which market you should get into that will make you all that gold that you crave for. I will try and cover a few aspects of the professions that can make you gold and by using those examples i'm pretty confident that you will get the right idea and the right info on what's going to work for you and ultimately make you gold, so lets get started. ( FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS POST I HAVE TAKEN A RANDOM SERVER INFORMATION EU-SUNSTRIDER (Horde) IN THIS CASE BUT IN FUTURE POSTS I'LL CHOOSE DIFFERENT SERVERS SO YOU CAN SEE IT'S NOT SERVER DEPENDENT )

   Ok so firist thing you want to do when you want to start a proper research on the market in general is see what you have, what you can make, and how well you can sell those goods that you can provide. So for starters lets say you have an alchemist that can make pots and flasks, now that you know what you have and what you can make you need to see how profitable that is going to be for you and is it worth it that you invest time and gold into it. The right way of going about this is first thing you need to do is go and type in in your web browser

http://eu.theunderminejournal.com    FOR EU Servers
http://theunderminejournal.com         FOR US Servers

and once you are there you need to get down to choosing your server, because that's the server you want to make gold on.

   Once you have arrived here you need to get your mouse in the Consumables rollover section and from there choose the Alchemy (or whatever other profession you want to check prices on) as you can see is shown on the image on the left.

   Once you've gotten yourself here there's a bit of information written down on the starting page as a way of explaining what is what, i wont go into details as to writing down what it is because it is very self explanatory and it's all laid down on the site so take a moment and read the legend there.

   Ok so you've read the legend and you are watching at those numbers next to the items in the left and wondering what is what, well keep on reading then.

   So after having read through the legend and getting an idea what Avail, Mats, Price, Mean is you can see that there's a bunch of numbers in there that some are green and others are red. Well what this is basically a street light effect telling you if there's profit to be made then it's green if there's a loss in making that item it's red (pretty simple huh), so as you can see lets say you want to try and get your feet wet by selling some flasks on the AH what do you sell. We can see that Flask of Steelskin, Winds and Draconic Mind all have a cost (mats worth) of about 20g to make while selling them at an average price 40ish gold. So this means that on every single flask you sell you get a 100% profit and that's quite good to be honest, but take a good look at the availability which shows is that there are 200 300 or even 500 of those flasks up on the AH which means if you are thinking of getting into that bit of the market then get ready to brush up your elbows off the competition for that piece of the profit pie.

    For the sake of argument lets say you didn't like your odds about the flasks and you want to try something else, maybe your spec in alchemy is as a potion master and you want to make profit by selling potions, then what you do is take a peek at the potion prices.

   If you see the prices there you will notice right away that there's some sweet profit to be made in the potions corner of the market as the crafting prices of the potions is 1-4g across the table while many of them are selling for prices raging 4-16g per potion ( take a look at the Potion Of Treasure Finding it sells for 140g, and yes that's the one that when you drink it it gives you a chance to acquire those Tiny Treasure Chests that usually contain volatiles, cloth, greens and gold ). So as we can notice if you were on that server and had alchemy you could make some good profits by jumping in on the potions market.

   So we started off this post with the assumption that you had alchemy, what if your lets say have a Leatherworker that you want to use to make gold with what do you do ? Well same as with the Alchemy first thing you choose the Leatherworking from the Enhancements rollover and from there you get the chart for leather working.

   Just like we saw up on the chart for alchemy we can notice the same setup here as well, in the first column you have the availability on the item on the AH at the given time, followed up by the cost of the mats for the crafting of the item ( that price is taken from the current price of the given mats from the AH at the given time ) and then you have the profit/loss column, but as you can see on the image which portraits the PvP gear that leatherworkers can craft it's green from top to bottom, well with the exclusion of that one item there but that's besides the point.

   This whole way of checking out which items are worth buying and investing in can be done safely before you ever have to invest a single piece of gold in a commodity you don't know how it's going to pan out by simply doing a bit of research which shouldn't take you more then 5 min and in return save you thousands of gold and net you those huge profits. Best thing about using this site to do your research is that you can do a quick research just about any item of interest being that you want to invest into materials so you can craft items, or if someone wants to sell you a piece of gear but you don't know what it's real worth is this is the place to check it out on.

   And so we come to the conclusion that by using our brains and actually doing the bit of a research on the matter we can get a pretty good idea as to what items are worth investing time and gold in, be it that it's alchemy, leatherworking, blacksmithing, jewelcrafting or anything you might think of we can be sure that we will make profits and by taking those given prices we can know a rough estimate of how much exactly we can expect to get out of our investment.

    So remember before you go buy buy buy do your research so when the time for sell sell sell comes you don't go QQ QQ QQ.



   And like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.
  

The Ultimate Gambler ... Profiting ??

   Ok, so i usually write about ways and trick on how to make gold while you are using the buy low, sell back at a profitable price, or even craft this, dominate market then profit. Today i would like to make a short post about something that caught my eye, which i think is something close to brilliant.

   What i'm talking about is a guy i saw that was barking on trade channel offering 30g per Heavy Junkbox ,which on it's own is an item any rogue can pickpocket from humanoid mobs that are 55-59 level. I have to admit, once i saw his barks i was immediately intrigued as to why he was buying them and i asked. His answer was dodgy at the least he told me he was getting rep with the Ravenhold Mannor, which could be the case but there was something that simply didn't add up, he wanted the lockboxes UNOPENED. So i left him be and didn't put too much stock into what he was doing until the next day i saw that same guy on the AH posting Teebu's Blazing Longsword for 50k gold.

    Now for those of you who weren't around in Vanilla WoW, or have never heard about this item, it's a sword that's really really resembling a lightsaber and even though it's stats are close to nothing coming patch 4.3 with the introduction of Transmogrification you will be able to make your weapon look like a lightsaber.  There are many people out there willing to shell out some serious gold, just so they can make their character as unique as possible. The catch with it is that it's a very very rare world drop and the Heavy Junkboxes have a 0.01% of dropping it.
 
   So like i said in the title if you happen to be one of those people that enjoy a bit of gambling, or maybe have even tried the Mysterious Fortune Cards but didn't like their taste then you might consider taking up the ULTIMATE GAMBLE and try and obtain this elusive item be it through farming it or gambling for it by barking trade and offering a price for Heavy Junkboxes.

   So like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.

Enchanting Your Way To Profit

   Today we'll take a bit of time to cover the enchanting aspect of the game and what it does and how to get the profits from doing all that enchanting so lets begin.


   Before i start going in details i would like to point out that there are many, and i do mean MANY people out there that have claimed that they can't level up their enchanting due to the fact that it's too expensive and they can't afford it, well if you are one of those people you are DEAD WRONG. Enchanting just happens to be one of the only professions that happens to be able to get profit from anything you enchant with a bit of a patience. ( Before i continue going on about what to do here is what NOT to do, DON'T enchant a single enchant on your own item over and over overwriting the previous enchant just so you can level, but instead put the enchants on a enchanting vellum usually found from the inscription supplier).

   So there you are leveling enchanting and in the process of it's leveling you are putting all your enchanting runs in a vellum and now instead of a wasted enchant on a useless piece of gear that you will never use you have a bag full of enchanting vellums that you can sell to the AH to make profit. I will not go about telling you which ones to choose to level it up faster or to make profit because that is always in a state of a flux which means you will have to check the prices of the enchants on the AH and see which ones are worth making so you can turn a profit on them.  (FOR A GUIDE ON POWERLEVELING ENCHANTING)

   Ok so you've followed the guide there and now you've gotten to the point where you can't level any more seeing as how you are 525 and maxed out so what now, well it's simple PROFIT TIME!

   One of the first things you want to do is go to your trainer and next to him you'll find a guy selling patterns for you to learn new 525 enchants ( It used to be that the only place you could get those enchants was from the vendor in Twilight Highlands but they changed it so now everyone can get it ). After you've learned those enchants which you can buy for enchanting materials as currency you should be prepared to shell out some gold and purchase the enchanting formulas which are the four main enchants for bracers ( Agility, Strength, Intellect and Stamina) as these are gonna be a major seller and a good boost to your own version of the Piles'O Gold image above.

   So now you've leveled up to 525 you've bought the Formulas from the vendor and you've acquired the ones from the AH (they are world BoE so if you were lucky enough to get em that way good for you) so what's the next step ?  Well the next step is the minimum effort maximum profit time. You need to open up TSM and in there make a section where you will input every single scroll you can make and value it up according to how much the worth is on the materials that are needed for that particular item and then set your upper threshold to be something like x8 of the base cost of the materials while the lowest point would be something like 150% of the worth of the materials. So for an example if you are selling a X enchant that requires Y,Z to make and the cost of Y,Z is 100g then you post the upper price as 800g and the lowest price at 150g that way no matter what you will be making profit seeing as how the posting fee for the scrolls is close to nothing. ( In case you don't know how to tweak out TSM check out the previous post covering that issue)

   Normally now that you are 85 and maxed out you will want to be able to enchant yourself as well as your friends which is just normal and you should expect other people to want the same thing, meaning to get their gear enchanted with the best possible enchant there is and that's the top tier enchanting which is good but don't forget about posting the enchants that twinks will want for their characters as those enchants hold almost as much profit if not more as the top tier enchants. I'll post a few of the enchants on which you should keep your eye out for:

Enchant Chest - Greater Stamina
Enchant Chest - Mighty Resilience
Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats 

   These three should be on your scope because they are one of the fastest moving scrolls due to the high demand for them (the resilience one is dirt cheap so if there aren't any on the AH use this to your advantage and make huge profits)

Enchant Weapon - Hurricane
Enchant Weapon - Landslide
Enchant Weapon - Windwalk 

   These three are the top sellers for the weapons division and 99% of the players out there depending on their spec and class will want one of these bad boys slapped on their weapon.

( !!! THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ONLY SELL THOSE 6 ENCHANTS !!! )

       But that's not all like i said previously you need to be selling all the enchants not only the top tier ones because people that are leveling alts or have chosen to take up playing a twink at a lower level bracket will not be able to use those enchants due to their item level requirement, so that's the market that you will be selling the enchants to. So like i said don't forget about those and respect the old school because it will bring you in some SERIOUS profits, and just for a clarification i will even put down a few enchants that have sold well for me in the past and have made a killer profit.






Enchant Weapon - Crusader  (if you don't have the enchant check out the post about acquiring it)
Enchant Weapon - Fiery Weapon
Enchant Weapon - Spellpower
Enchant Weapon - Mighty Intellect
Enchant Weapon - Mighty Spirit
Enchant Weapon - Strength      

   And all of these enchants are the enchants that all the twinks will want for their weapons so keep an eye out for their materials as this market is very unpredictable as for materials costs where on some days you'll be able to pick up the materials for 1g while the next day will spike to 100g so keep an eye out for those prices and if no one is selling those on the AH then you can make a killing on selling those.

   Well that's about it for starting out in making gold with Enchanting and like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.